


One Thing Leads to Another

by scioscribe



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Concussions, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Monster Hunters, Multi, The Upside Down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-23 18:46:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17688890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Nancy has a tip that there's another portal up in Michigan.  Closing it isn't going to go smoothly.





	One Thing Leads to Another

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alessandriana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alessandriana/gifts).



_Steve_

Jonathan has good taste in music.  It doesn’t mitigate the shittiness of Steve being stuck in this truck with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, it doesn’t fix the busted heater, and it doesn’t make what they’re doing any smarter, but hey, it’s something.  The cassette deck works.  It’ll probably be the only part of this thing that survives the trip, the three of them included.

Steve was the one who got out to pump gas at their last stop.  That was an hour ago, and the snow on his boots hasn’t even melted yet.  Nancy’s puffy blue parka makes a slippery, hissy sound against Steve’s whenever one of them moves, and whatever, the friction’s useless, the body heat’s useless, actual warmth is a distant memory at this point.  But at least they’ve got The Fixx pouring out of the speakers, asking _why don’t they do what they say, say what you mean,_ telling them that _one thing leads to another._ Yeah.  He’s figured that one out by now.

The three of them are on their way to Michigan.  According to one of Nancy’s new bizarre pen pals, somebody found in the back pages of a paranormal fanzine, there’s a whole Hawkins Redux situation going on up there.

Maybe.

A portal to the Upside Down.  A giant waste of their time.  Heads, he loses; tails, he loses—he really isn’t thrilled about either outcome here, honestly, but he’s still here.

For a variety of reasons, some of which he’s willing to admit to and some of which he’s not.

He looks out the window.  Snow.  Patch of woods.  Snow.  Dirty snow.  Little town.

Nancy’s the one with the map, charting their route with a blue marker, but Steve cranes over to look at it the next time he sees an exit sign.

Nancy covers it with her hand, almost defensively.  “That’s not going to make you happy.”

He groans and settles back.  _Snick_ go their parkas, nylon against nylon.  Jonathan’s wearing this oversized black wool coat that looks all right on him, sort of artsy and woodsy at the same time; he’s probably getting those little glides against Nance, too, and Steve just can’t hear it because the wool puts Jonathan in stealth mode.  Though Jonathan used to exist entirely in stealth mode, as far as Steve was concerned; the guy was invisible until suddenly he wasn’t anymore.

Steve says—a little more plaintively than he’d like—“Could you maybe drive a little faster, man?”

“Believe me, I’d love to, but I’m not exactly amped up to get pulled over and have the cops lift up the tarp in back.”

Yeah.  Fair enough.  None of it’s illegal—nail-spiked bat, bear traps, crossbow, walkie-talkies, your basic Hawkins survival kit—but it’s pretty far from kosher and they’re pretty far from home.

“Next time we take my car,” Steve says.  He doesn’t even care if he’s being a little rich boy.  He wants feeling back in his fingertips.

“Look, this was the only thing I could borrow that would hold up for the trip.  My car’s still in the shop.  And Nancy’s doesn’t have snow tires and neither does yours.”

“I had heat.”  He jams his hands in his pockets, which hunches his shoulders up by his ears.  He did _not_ come prepared for this—any of it.

“We’ll get you some gloves,” Nancy says, “next town we see.  And a hat.”  She slides her arm through his and Steve tenses up for a second—this girl, he can’t touch her casually, he doesn’t know how.  “I know it sucks, but I’m still glad you came.”

“Yeah.”  Jonathan glances over at him.  “Thanks.  It’s good to go in as a team, you know, if there’s trouble.”

Nancy squeezes him and then—par for the course—lets him go.  But the snow on his boots has finally thawed to slush.  That’s cool, he thinks, swallowing down some kind of impulse, some kind of confession.  He says lightly, “I’m just a guy with a bat and a dream.  I’m counting on the two of you to watch my back or else you’ll face the wrath of…”  He waves his hand.  “Wizards and paladins and some shit.  ‘The Party.’  I told the kids I’d drive them to Indianapolis next weekend to go to this specialty game store.”  It probably doesn’t exist.  They’re probably trapping him into this exact same road trip and he’s going to spend the rest of his life on this exact same road.

“It’s nice of you to chauffeur,” Nancy says.

“I don’t know about nice.  I’m doomed to running errands for the little shits.”

“Mike says Dustin would walk over hot coals for you.”

“If I had any hot coals right now, believe me, I’d have better uses for them than that.”  He blows on his fingers, which makes exactly zero difference.

“You can wear my gloves until we can stop somewhere,” Jonathan says.

Steve shakes his head.  “Screw it.  I can put my hands in my pockets, you can’t.”

“You’re just flopping around like a fish.  I mean, not in a bad way.”

“There’s a good way?”

Nancy interrupts this, which is good, because Steve has no idea where it’s going; if he starts getting off on arguing in cars, he’s going to turn into his parents, like, both of them simultaneously.

“There’s the exit,” Nancy says.  “Gloves ahoy.”

They stop at a bargain supermarket in a strip mall; Steve buys padded gloves, a goofy-looking hat, and a clutch of candy bars for the road; Nancy checks out in the next-over cashier aisle, buying hair spray and a lighter and a pack of gum, so—a flamethrower and a pack of gum.  Nice.  Jonathan buys some comic book that Steve knows is for Will.  Practical girl, impractical guy.  He likes them, he finally admits to himself—that is exactly how screwed he is.  He has… shifted, somehow, like all the snowdrifts he’s seen on this never-ending fucking drive to nowhere.  He’s gone from being lovesick for Nance—fine, pathetic but fine—to being lovesick for Nancy and Jonathan, and not even Nancy, one entity, and Jonathan, one entity, but Nancy-and-Jonathan, the package deal.  It’s not an option.

You get one person in life.  One.  If you’re lucky.  (And he’s not.)  You don’t get two—and definitely not these two.

He passes out the candy bars once they’re back in the truck, and his sleeve slides against Nancy’s— _snick_ —and Jonathan winds up with a spot of chocolate on his chin.  Steve looks out the window, because he sure as hell doesn’t want to look anywhere else.  Bring on the nightmarish portal to monster dog world.  He can’t wait.

*

“This is the place,” Nancy says.

“Woods,” Jonathan says.  “Why is it always woods?”

“I’m moving to the city,” Steve says.  He grabs the baseball bat out of the back of the truck and flips it back and forth in his hand.  The weight is reassuring and if thinking that makes him feel like Linus with his security blanket, then so be it.  “I can live without a yard.”

“You’re sure this is the place?” Jonathan says.

Nancy nods.  “Paula was really clear about it.  Longitude and latitude.”

“And you’re sure—”

“Yes,” she says impatiently, “I’m pretty sure she’s not crazy.  It all fits, guys—everything she’s saying about what’s going on here is crap you could have said about home.  Down to the… goopy stuff.  Paula found a tree that looked like it had been split open by lightning, making this weird kind of door, and it was dripping wet inside and cobwebby and it smelled like rotten meat.  Does that sound normal to you?  She crouched down and looked inside and she said it looked dark, but not dark like looking into an animal’s den or anything.  Dark like night.  Like she thought she saw stars.”

“And then she figured she’d get the hell out of here and just write it down for somebody else to deal with,” Jonathan murmurs.  “So she’s smarter than us.”

“Way smarter,” Steve says morosely.

Nancy wraps a length of chain around her shoulder and slides the hairspray into her jacket pocket.  “Look, either we check it out, or we do nothing and the lab hears about it and they do who knows what.  And someone gets hurt again, like Barb.  Like Will.”

The conspiracy angle isn’t what sells Steve.  He’s not a big picture kind of guy.  But he knows that if they walk away right now, Dustin and all the rest of the kids that he is now somehow regrettably responsible for will find some batshit way to get to Michigan and they’ll go poking their little twelve year-old noses into all this and probably get their asses kicked.  At best.  He doesn’t have a hypothetical duty to some people who _might_ get screwed over someday, he has an actual responsibility to a bunch of middle schoolers who like adventure way too damn much.

And, sure, he wants Nancy and Jonathan to think he’s tough.  Sort of dashing, even.

“All right,” he says.  “Let’s get down to business.”

Nancy gives him the look that made him fall head over heels for her in the first place— _I know what I’m doing, I know what I want, and you’re it_ —and Steve steps away from her gaze and into the dense thicket of trees before he can let himself think about the fact that he’s _not_ what she wants.

They’ve all got flashlights, which is good, because it’s getting close to dark.  (Of course it is.)

“I don’t want to wind up stuck in the woods overnight,” Steve says.

“Yeah, seconded,” Jonathan says.  “I’m not a camping kind of guy.”

“I have my dad’s credit card.”  Nancy ducks under a low-hanging branch.  She looks, Steve thinks, like a very terrifying pixie, Tinkerbell armed to the teeth.  “I can get us a hotel room.  My parents think I’m with friends.  I mean, I don’t have any friends anymore besides the two of you, but they don’t seem to ever remember that, so… might as well reap some rewards for it, right?”

Her voice is light, but she’s not fooling anybody.  Steve is surprised to see Jonathan glance over at him, like this falls on both of them, like it doesn’t matter that Jonathan’s the only official boyfriend.

“I never really have to tell my parents anything,” Steve offers.  “Even when they’re around, they don’t ever ask.”

“I remember.”  She smiles softly.  He can see her still, across the table from him at his parents’ place, politely answering the same question twice.  She wore a new dress.  He still remembers the nubbly texture of it.  “Your parents are both like my dad.  I mean, he’s nice.  Your parents are nice.  And my mom’s fine, she’s trying, she cares, she just—”

“She’s wrapped up in Mike and Holly,” Jonathan says.  “Right?  That’s my mom with Will, times about a hundred now, for obvious reasons.”

Nancy laughs.  “I shudder to think what would happen if Mom knew literally anything about what Mike got up to.”  She shines her flashlight way out ahead of them, making all the trees look the same dusty, shadowy color.  “I think it’s this way, past the log, based on the pictures she sent.  Parent pity-party can wait.”  She speeds up and passes ahead of them.

“Will’s a good kid,” Steve says, a little awkwardly.  “Kind of weird that I know that, but—”

“It’s not weird,” Jonathan says.  He sounds sure of himself, like Steve’s strangeness is a math problem that he’s solved to his own satisfaction, like he could show his work if Steve asked him to.  “You’re good with them.  It’s like you were supposed to be somebody’s big brother and Dustin just—corrected the universe.  Anyway, I like you a lot better now that you’re in babysitter mode half the time and you, like, take my little brother out for ice cream instead of being a dick.”

“Cool,” Steve says dryly.  “Thanks.  Your approval means the world to me.  I like you better now too, which for the record doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why doesn’t it make sense?”

“Because you’re the boyfriend and I’m the guy who isn’t good enough.”

Jonathan shakes his head.  “That’s not it, Steve.”  Now he sounds sad.

He can join the club.  They can listen to worse, sappier music than Jonathan’s got in his freezing-ass truck, except he guesses they don’t make songs for this, not for him and not for whatever the hell is bugging Jonathan.

“Guys!” Nancy calls back.

Steve’s grateful for the distraction.  He hurries and catches up with her; unites his flashlight beam with her own.

“Yep,” he says.  “That’s Hawkins.”

“Good to be home, right?”

Jonathan joins them.  “No,” he says, taking a look at the cavernous, fleshy crack in the tree.  “It’s really not.  Steve’s right, we need to all head to a city.”

“That just means you’re fighting monsters on the subway,” Nancy says cheerfully.

“I have a question,” Steve says.  “Now that we’re here, what exactly are we planning to do with this?  Board it up?  Burn it out?”

“I vote fire,” Jonathan says.  “More thorough.”

“I just want to get a look inside first,” Nancy says.

That’s so obviously a bad idea that Steve waits for the universe itself to reject it and for time to just rewind, but nothing happens, so he and Jonathan have to spend fifteen minutes trying and failing to talk Nancy out of it.  She’s gone full adrenaline junkie on them.  And what’s worse is she acts like they’re just going to let her crawl through the creepy womb tree all on her own.  It makes Steve make some idiotic comparison to the Three Musketeers and then an even more idiotic, and Dustin-inspired, comparison to _Star Wars._

“Why do you get to be Han Solo?” Jonathan says, slinging a rope up over a firm-looking tree branch and tying it off.

“Because I’m cool.  Or I used to be cool.  And you have that whole—vibe going on.”  He wiggles his fingers around, unsure of what he means.

“Like I have special powers?”  Jonathan raises his eyebrows.

“Like you could, hypothetically, be some kind of warrior monk knight person—dude, just leave me alone.  Nancy, this is an insane amount of rope.  No wonder you didn’t have any room to pack any snacks.”

“I prioritized,” she says crisply, and ties the other end of the rope around her waist.  “At least I thought to bring gloves.  All right.  Stay with me.”

 

 

_Jonathan_

The inside of the tree is slick and viscous—it feels like Jonathan’s crawling out of the sweaty inside of a Halloween mask, and that’s actually the more palatable metaphor he comes up with.  At least it’s an in and out trip.

The Upside Down is swelteringly hot.  Jonathan doesn’t know what dictates the meteorology of this place, what makes it hot now when it was always cold for Will, but looking at Steve stripping off his gloves, he kind of suspects it might be spite.  He doesn’t really believe this place is neutral.  Somebody may have cracked their way to it through a lab, but Will is right to think it’s more Dungeons and Dragons than science fiction.  This is fantasy and horror, a dark world full of monsters, actively malevolent.  And it looks like a heavy metal album cover.

Steve’s got ropy strands of mushroom-colored fungus in his hair and he’s combing them out as fast as he can; Nancy’s brushing some jellied, clotted stuff off her parka, her face cramped up with revulsion.  Jonathan has some of that on him too, but it doesn’t bother him as much as the long, pale, fleshy leech he finds on top of his tennis shoe.  That makes his stomach turn, and he pulls it off and throws it far away from him.

He’s not thrilled about the way that pitch is followed by a chittering, whirring sound, like the thing’s taken flight on insect wings.  Although he doesn’t know what he expected.

“Okay,” he says.  “We’re here.  Any chance we can just turn around and go back now?”

Steve is up for it: “Yeah, we’ve verified that this place is a shithole.”

“I just want to take a look around,” Nancy says.  “Just enough to make it worth that we climbed through that extremely gross tunnel in the first place.”

“Nothing will make that worth it,” Steve mutters, but he follows her anyway.

So does Jonathan.  He’s working a problem—Nancy’s not the only one who wants to see how this goes, even if they’re asking different questions.  He’s not curious about the Upside Down—Jonathan’s hate goes along a completely different track from his interest—but he’s curious about _this_.  Not that he knows what _this_ is, besides a strange kind of gut feeling.  It’s like whatever urge makes him snap a picture.  Something here, among the three of them, wants to be noticed, wants to be recognized as something worth looking at, maybe even something beautiful.

Which is probably ridiculous.  But here and now, in this place, he can stand a little ridiculousness if it means he gets to remember that literally anything is beautiful, anywhere.

Nancy’s not going to be happy unless she kills a monster.

That thought is… less beautiful.

“This place seems pretty deserted,” Jonathan says.

“Maybe we’re in the Upside Down boonies,” Steve says.  “Or a ghost town.  They had some creepy gold rush here and then the whole area emptied out.”

“I can’t imagine making jewelry out of anything in this place,” Nancy says.

Steve laughs.  “Come on, you don’t want a necklace made out of four carat—”

It happens fast.

( _Spite_ , Jonathan will think afterwards, numbly.  It knew they were glad to be alone.  It knew they were starting to relax a little.)

It’s not whatever monster had its hooks in Will and it’s not whatever one was skulking around the house before, the one they fought, and it’s not one of those weird flower-headed dogs, either.  It’s tall and spindly-thin and its arms are as long as its legs and they end—they all end, because while he can’t count them, there are more than two—in enormous, claw-like hands that are as big as shovels.  And it makes its presence known by galloping out of the darkness to their left and smashing into Steve.

Steve gets knocked down, but he comes up swinging and smashes the baseball bat against its legs and maybe a little bit of its belly—it howls in pain and gooey yellow blood spatters against the grass.

Nancy’s busy with the chain, so Jonathan lifts the hairspray off her and pops the lighter; he sends a blast of fire towards the thing, which goes on screaming its high-pitched howl.  Steve takes advantage of its distraction to hit another home run into its side before it comes at him again.  Jonathan would feel sorry for it, but then it starts slamming Steve back into the ground every time he starts to stand.  If it weren’t for that…

And if it weren’t for Will.  Everything about Will.

Nancy finishes it off by lashing the chain around the thing’s neck and pulling—it’s so tall and she’s so light that it lifts her up off the ground and starts to swing her around like a yo-yo, but Jonathan grabs onto her with all his strength and holds her while she holds it until finally, finally, the thing stops breathing and collapses into a withered-looking heap.

Jonathan stares at it, his heart pounding in his chest, until he believes it’s really dead and not coming back.  He can’t seem to get his hand to unwrap from around the hairspray can and then he remembers Steve and drops it at once and runs over to him.

Nancy’s already there.  She’s down on her knees in the mucky gray mud.  “Steve, Steve, come on, stay with me.”  Her voice is higher than Jonathan has ever heard it.

“What?”  Steve sounds fuzzy, his words slurred.  “I’m here.  Not going anywhere.”

But there are deep cuts all across his head and arms and shoulders, bleeding like crazy, and his face is already red and puffy with forming bruises.  Jonathan saw how hard that thing hit him with those claw-hands that looked like they were made out of concrete—and it went at him over and over again.  Steve’s got to be feeling like his brains are scrambled egg right now.

When Jonathan looks at Nancy, all he can see is how white she’s gotten.  It’s like she’s lost as much blood as Steve has.

Jonathan doesn’t feel any more capable, but he at least feels like his brain is working in a basic, mechanical kind of way, so he says, gently, “Okay, Steve, man, let’s get you sitting up, all right?  We need to get you out of here.”

“We shouldn’t have come,” Nancy whispers.

“Well, we’re here.”  He doesn’t mean to be short with her.  He loves that she rushes into things, that she wants answers and action, he does—it’s just that he maybe loves it a little bit less right now with Steve blinking at him slowly, like Jonathan’s words aren’t sinking in at all.  Nancy has her hand in Steve’s hair and is combing through it.  Jonathan knows she’s feeling blood—he can tell by the way her whole face cramps up like she’s trying not to cry.  He reaches and grabs her fingers and then they’re holding hands with Steve’s hair threaded through their grasp.  Somehow that feels right.  He rubs his thumb across Steve’s head in a place where he thinks there aren’t any bruises or cracks.

This is something dangerous, Jonathan thinks numbly.  But they’ve gotten themselves into trouble before.

And they have bigger problems right now.  Like how to get Steve out of here in the shape he’s in and what the hell to do next.

He and Nancy move in silent, well-choreographed unison, propping Steve up between them.  Their hands are still laced at the back of his head and it feels like they’re the only thing keeping him from falling.  He’s still blinking in that dazed way that Jonathan really, really doesn’t like.

“Nancy, can you get through to him somehow?  I just—I want to know if he’s still hearing us at all.”

She nods.  With her other hand, she pats Steve’s chest in one of the few unbloodied patches.

“Steve?”

Steve’s disoriented gaze swings slightly towards her.  “Nance-and-Jonathan,” he says, like it’s all one word, and then for some reason color suffuses through his face—he’s _blushing_.  Why?  But at least it seems to bring him back to himself a little because he swallows a couple of times and then says, “You’re okay… you’re both okay… aren’t you?”

“We’re fine,” Nancy says instantly.  “We’re fine.  It went right for you.”  She moves her hand, the one entwined with Jonathan’s, petting Steve’s head like he’s a cat.  “I think it liked your hair.”

“Everybody does,” Steve says.  He closes his eyes.  “Kids—”  Open again, alarmed now.  He lurches forward and it takes both of them to stop him from faceplanting into the mud.  “The kids.  Did he get to the kids?”

Shit.  Billy—he thinks Billy Hargrove beat the shit out of him again.  “It wasn’t him, Steve.  We’re in the Upside Down.”

“Dogs,” Steve says.  “But they didn’t—”

“The kids are fine,” Jonathan says, and watches the words hit Steve like a tranquilizer.  He’s suddenly pliable again, content to be moved around however they want as long as everyone’s fine.  And Jonathan wants—

Wants to kiss him.

He doesn’t want to let go of Nancy, but he wants to kiss Steve, too.  That’s the dangerous thing at the center of the photograph.

 _Not now_ , he tells himself.  _Not ever, probably, but especially not now.  
_

“What is it?”

He can’t tell her.  He has to tell her, but he can’t tell her, and dammit, none of this is important right now.  None of this is going to matter, none of anything is going to matter, if they can’t get out of here.

So all he says is, “We have to start following the rope back.  Can you help me get him up?”

Nancy does.  She might be tiny, but she gives everything she has, always, and Jonathan’s always surprised at how much of a physical match she is for him in—everything.  She bites her lower lip bloody as they work to haul Steve back to the tree they came through, but she does just as much of the pulling as Jonathan does.

“It’s not your fault,” Jonathan says finally.

Steve is dead weight at this point.  It’s probably for the best that he’s unconscious—they’re not good at this and it’s a bumpy trip.  If he were awake, he might be in agony.  Jonathan plans to keep telling himself that, anyway, just to try to contain his worry about what Steve passing out might mean in the long run.

He can reserve some worry for how grim Nancy is looking.

He tries again.  “It’s not.”

“It is.  Neither one of you wanted to come through here.  You’re right, we should have just torched it from the outside, I don’t know what the _fuck_ I was thinking.”

He can’t shrug with Steve’s arm over his shoulder.  “You wanted to know.  We never get to know anything—no one’s ever just going to open up and tell us what’s going on with all this unless we try to get a look ourselves.  You’re an explorer.”

“Yeah, well, the explorers got a lot of people killed.”

“No one’s dying,” Jonathan says.  He feels his arm tighten around Steve.  “You know that.  We’ve done this before.  We have… hero points.”

She laughs.  It’s a husk of a laugh, but it’s a laugh.  “Jonathan.  Hero points?”

“I can’t think of the right D&D terminology.”

The rope dead-ends at the tree.  For a second, all Jonathan can see is smooth, uninterrupted bark, and he feels like he’s going to throw up—but it’s just panic clouding his eyes.  The gate hasn’t sealed itself while they’ve been inside.  The portal back home is still open.  Gooey and disgusting, but open.

“We’re going to have to push him up through that,” Jonathan says, nodding at the dark opening in the tree.  “Like… unbirthing a baby.”

“Great, thanks for _that_ analogy,” Nancy mutters, squatting down.  “Now I know how guys feel when they see a movie where someone gets kicked in the balls.  Steve, can you wake up for us?”  She strokes his cheek and Jonathan has an odd sense of double vision—there’s a way he can look at this where all Nancy is doing is moving some of the mud and blood off Steve’s skin and there’s another, more honest way, where it’s a caress.  Where it means something.

Maybe it’s just because his chest is crowded right now—with fear and worry and love and everything else—but it doesn’t spark any jealousy in him, Nancy touching Steve.  He doesn’t think she’s leaving him.

Instead, Jonathan thinks, _Please_ , not entirely knowing what he’s asking for, and Steve’s eyes open.

Okay.  That works.

They edge Steve through—he does this funny dog-paddling motion to help them—and then go through themselves.  Jonathan takes enormous breaths on the other side, gulping in crystal-clear air.  He watches as Nancy tucks herself up against Steve’s side, stroking his back and murmuring to him.  She looks at him, her eyes starry points.  He nods.  The frame closes around them again, capturing this as some little piece of meaning.

“It’s so fucking cold,” Steve mutters, kicking his feet out, sending up a glittering burst of snow.  His eyes are drooping again.

Nancy makes a lighter-popping motion with her thumb.  “Light it up,” she says.

Jonathan does, burning the soft, rotten, Upside Down heart out of the tree.  The snow around them melts and grays with floating ash; they all move to shield their mouths and eyes.  They can’t risk leaving until the portal is a closed and blackened husk, but at least he thinks he can see it going.

The firelight flickers orange and yellow across their faces and none of them are shivering anymore.  He touches Nancy’s cheek and the back of Steve’s wrist: warm.

 

 

_Nancy_

They wind up at the motel after all.

She rents the room on her own because she can’t stand to leave Steve alone in the truck—Jonathan parks just out of sight of the glassed-in office so she knows they’re there at her back, steadying her while she pays and picks up the room key and endures the manager’s leering.  It’s better than him screaming in horror, which is what he would have done before she was able to wash up.  They stopped at a gas station, wasting precious minutes of time, just so she could slip to the bathroom unnoticed and get the gunk—the webs and blood and goop—off of her.  One of them had to look presentable enough to go into the drugstore and load up on first aid supplies and she was the best choice.

 _People don’t really see you,_ Jonathan said.  _They don’t suspect you of anything._

And right now, this gross hotel clerk doesn’t suspect that she has a nail-studded bat just a few steps away that she would happily swing into his dick if he doesn’t just _give her the room already._

He does, so she doesn’t head out for the bat after all.  Instead, she goes to the truck and tells Jonathan which side of the motel to drive around to, what number room they’re looking for.  Jonathan is steering one-handed, his other hand holding Steve’s.

He looks at her over Steve’s head.  “I don’t know what we’re doing.”  His voice is low, thoughtful.  No—not thoughtful.  Intense.  “Do you?”

“Medically?”

She sees his Adam’s apple bob.  “No.  Not medically.  I mean yeah, but—this.  You and me… and him.”

She thought all this time she had been imagining it.  She always knew she liked them both—loved them both—but until this second, she thought she would have to choose.  First Steve, because he felt like home, and then Jonathan, because he felt like purpose.  She kept telling herself, _Don’t tease him, don’t mess around on him, make a choice and fucking stick to it,_ but now—

She unbuckles her seatbelt.  “I want what I want,” she says, getting out into the crisp, freezing air.  It smells of snow and exhaust fumes off the highway.  It’s easier with the roar of the cars going by, with the cold wind on her face, freezing the tears that she didn’t realize were still in her eyelashes.  “I want you both, Jonathan.  I love you both.  I just don’t want to break anybody’s heart and that—that feels like all I keep doing.  But if it doesn’t break yours—”

“It doesn’t.”  He’s sliding out of the car now, gently bringing Steve with him, lifting Steve’s legs down to the winter-cracked asphalt.  “I don’t know about his.”

But Nancy doesn’t think Steve’s heart has ever been broken except by being left behind.  She could be wrong, but—

And she’s seen how Steve’s looked at Jonathan lately.

She shakes her head.  “There’s no dating configuration on earth that’s going to make any of this okay if we can’t get him fixed up.  Let’s get him inside.”

Steve vetoed the ER during one of his brief periods of lucidity.

 _I’m covered in alien shit,_ he said.  _I’ll wind up locked away and so will you.  Please, just—just take me somewhere._

This is that somewhere.  A crappy motel room with one double bed.  They lay Steve down on the ugly flowered bedspread and cut his shirt off him and peel it away.

It comes off slowly, sticking to the drying blood, and the pain of it pulling wakes Steve up again.  He turns and grabs blindly for the wastebasket and vomits into it.

“Dude,” Jonathan says, a little breathlessly.  “I’m surprised you didn’t just puke on the floor.”

“Some of us have manners, Byers,” Steve says.

He knows who they are, which is good, and he knows enough about _where_ they are to intuit where the trash can was, which is even better.

That being said… it probably would have been easier on him if he had kept sleeping through all this.  Nancy tells him so and he falls back against the pillows, grimacing and grinning at the same time: “Since when do I manage to make things easy?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy says, “getting you into bed was pretty easy.  This time and before.”  She puts on the latex gloves and unpacks the drugstore bag.  Disinfectant.  Gauze.  Aspirin.  “I like that in a guy.”

Steve is back to blinking at her.  “Jonathan’s here, you know, Nance.”

“Yep.  I know that.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan says.  “I’m here.”

“Okay,” Steve says, dragging out the word.  “I think I might have a concussion.”

“I have zero doubt of that,” Jonathan says.

Steve considers this.  “I get a lot of concussions lately,” he says gravely, and then winces as Nancy starts cleaning up the cuts on his head.  The ones on his chest look deeper, but the ones on his head worry her more—she wants to make sure they’re as shallow as she thinks they are, that they only bled so much because head wounds always do.  She thinks she’s right.  Not that she’s going to feel any better about this until Steve is a hundred percent again.

Jonathan sits on the edge of the bed, his hand hovering near Steve’s leg.  “Do you remember what we did?”

“Something stupid.”

“Doesn’t narrow it down,” Nancy murmurs, moving on now to the claw-marks on Steve’s chest.  “Keep talking.  It’ll distract you.”

“Sure.  Distract me from the blinding agony of— _ow_ —fucking hydrogen peroxide.  I hate that shit so much…  Um, we ran into a monster that I’m sure Dustin’s going to make up some dumbass name for and we got our asses kicked.  Or I did.”

“You kicked its ass plenty in return,” Nancy says.

“Ripped it open like a tauntaun,” Jonathan says.  “If we’re going to be doing the whole _Star Wars_ comparison thing today.”  He cards his fingers very carefully through Steve’s hair.  Nancy can see the effort it takes for him to do it openly, with Steve awake and everything on the line.

Steve freezes and then says, “Nancy, I’m fine, I’m fine.  I’m going to throw up again, probably, but I’m fine—I just need to sleep.  Nothing’s making any sense.”

“This?” Jonathan says.

“Yeah.  This.  Everything.  The two of you acting like—like you’re just going to—”  He looks handsome, Nancy thinks faintly, handsome and brave and terrified; not Han Solo but Steve the Babysitter, Steve who came back in to face the Demogorgon, Steve who can’t pass out from pain until he knows that everyone else is okay.  “Like you’re just going to give me everything I want.”

Everything he wants.

Nancy can feel Jonathan’s smile without even having to see it.  She can feel it like she feels her own—the warmest thing in this whole winter, like if they had figured this out on the way here they wouldn’t have complained so much about the busted heat.  Steve’s cold hands and warm heart.  And the three of them.  The three of them together.

She knows that realistically, she probably dragged them into an almost literal hell because she can’t stop wanting to know what’s out there, wanting to know what’s on the other side of all this—but right now, it feels like maybe this was what she was looking for, like this was her discovery.  This is what they came so far to find.

She leans in and kisses Steve’s forehead as softly as she can.

“Everything we all want,” she says.

 

 

_Steve_

At first he doesn’t open his eyes.  What he’s feeling seems to line up with what he’s remembering—his head feels like it’s filled with broken glass, his mouth tastes like shit, and there’s a warm body to either side of him—but it still might be a dream, something the Upside Down did to fuck with his head.  But finally he looks.

He looks and he sees shitty motel art—blobby landscapes—and Nancy’s hair spread across the pillow in front of him.  He cranes his head around, playing through the pain, and—yep, there’s Jonathan.  Nancy Wheeler on one side of him and Jonathan Byers on the other.  Jonathan’s got one arm stretched across Steve, got his fingers loosely curled in Nancy’s shirt.  Nancy is snoring a little.

The motel room smells like cigarette smoke and cheap lemon furniture polish.  He and Jonathan both reek.  Nancy must have cleaned up at some point, but she’s still got a little knot of Upside Down webbing on her collar.  Every muscle he has hurts.

But this is good.  This is perfect.


End file.
